I. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to data processing systems and particularly to analog/hybrid computing systems.
II. Prior Art
Analog/hybrid computing systems are known in the art such as Pacer 700 manufactured by Electronic Associates, Inc. Some of these prior hybrid computing systems have operated with a plurality of analog consoles to run hybrid simulations. However, prior systems have been limited in that they could not effectively run more than one hybrid simulation at a time. During the running of a single hybrid simulation for a user there are gaps of time when no computation or computation at slow speed takes place. For example, a user may be checking his program, he may be debugging his program or he may be examining results before the beginning of computation. Further, he may be waiting for initial conditions to be reached. During these times when the user waited or used slow speeds, the full resources of the hybrid computing system were not being taken advantage of. This resulted in a substantial effective loss in computer time of a costly system. A further drawback of these prior hybrid systems has been that they could not operate in a true multi-task mode. While they could run one hybrid simulation for a user they could not at the same time perform other important tasks for other users to effect maximum cost effectiveness of the hybrid system.